


Borrowed Time

by grilledcheesing



Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Fix-It of Sorts, Time Travel, angst obviously because look who it is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-05-13
Packaged: 2020-02-07 12:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18620659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grilledcheesing/pseuds/grilledcheesing
Summary: WARNING — SPOILERS FOR AVENGERS: ENDGAME.It’s been two years since the final battle with Thanos. On the surface, Peter has everything together. It's freshman year and he's interning with Bruce Banner, living with his best friend, and has extended Spider-Man's radius of superheroism out to Manhattan.The truth is, though, the busier Peter keeps himself, the less likely it is that anyone will notice he's falling apart. That is, until he runs into the one person who can cut past his bullshit — a person who is very much supposed to be dead.





	1. Chapter 1

_Incoming call from Pepper Potts_.

 

Peter shoots up from his seat in the lecture hall like a rocket, his knees knocking into the fold out desk. Half the class turns around to stare at him in the back row, but none as quick as MJ, whose eyes snap onto his so fast that it feels less like a stare and more like a puncture wound.

 

“Sorry,” he blurts.

 

Professor Howard blinks at him, pausing her lecture on the human perception of time long enough that Peter wonders if, during the course of the lecture, time got yanked out from under him.

 

Then he realizes she’s paused because he’s still standing in the back row like a loon.

 

“Mr. Parker?”

 

It’s a testament to how often he has managed to make a colossal embarrassment of himself a mere two months into his second semester at Empire State that, in this class of 200 students, a professor he has never spoken to knows his name.

 

“I’ll — be right back,” he mumbles, shoving his buzzing phone into the pocket of his jacket. When his eyes graze the front row, MJ’s head is already buried in her lecture notes, the back of her radiating like an impenetrable wall.

 

Once he makes it out of the lecture hall and out onto 14th Street, he swipes the phone screen, his heart hammering in his throat — Pepper has his schedule better memorized than he does, and would _never_ call him during class, short of an international disaster — but it isn’t Pepper on the other side of the screen.

 

Peter blows out a breath. “What’s the 411, squirt?”

 

“I’m not a squirt,” says Morgan, her face full of what appears to be a Pop-Tart, a blanket tied as a cape draped around her shoulders. “I’m a squirrel.”

 

“Fair enough,” says Peter. He starts walking down the street, letting the adrenaline simmer out of him. It’s like how Bucky keeps telling him: breathe it in and breathe it out. “Whatcha up to?”

 

Morgan beams into the camera phone, her eyes gleaming. “I found Mommy’s phone.”

 

“I see that.”

 

“Do you want to see up my nose?”

 

“Uh — ”

 

Morgan presses her face up to the camera, which then goes black with nostril. “D’you see?”

 

“Is that a unicorn up there?”

 

Morgan lets out a giggle.

 

“And a whole cloud of fairies?”

 

Morgan pulls the phone away from her nose, her little face squished from laughter.

 

“Honestly, you might want to get a flashlight — I might’ve seen a dragon — ”

 

“Ex _cuse_ you, small fry,” says Pepper, walking into the frame. “Who are you pestering on that thing?”

 

“Pete!”

 

“Pete? Lemme see,” says Pepper, prying the phone from Morgan’s hand. Peter resists the urge to lower the phone from his face, or pretend the connection’s faulty. It’s a Stark phone. They both know it’d be a lie. “Hey, kiddo.”

 

Sure enough, Pepper’s brows immediately furrow, peering at him through the screen in a way he has gone to great lengths to avoid being peered at. It’s why he only visits them in person once a month or so, on one of his good days. One of the days where Pepper won’t ask him how he’s sleeping, and May won’t lure him to sit with a cookie from the bodega down the street and trap him into a lecture about living an “integrated superhero life.”

 

The trouble is, the good days are sometimes few and far between.

 

“Hey Pepper.”

 

She lifts the phone out of Morgan’s grasp. “Is everything okay?”

 

“Oh — yeah — Morgan was the one who called me, so — ”

 

“Tattle tale,” Morgan chimes.

 

“So everything’s fine,” Peter finishes lamely.

 

Pepper purses her lips at him. It’s hard to lie to someone who lived with Tony Stark.

 

“When are you coming up?” she asks.

 

“Oh,” says Peter, caught off guard. Usually he’s the one who asks if they’re free. “I’m not — I mean — ”

 

“We’d really love to see you. Morgan wants to show you her Legos.”

 

The first feeling is an ache — he really does miss Morgan. From the moment they first clapped eyes on each other, Peter grief-stricken and lost, Morgan confused and wary, there was this sort of feeling — deeper than friendship, older than either of them. Like they already knew each other, maybe. Like they already understood they’d know each other for life.

 

That first month after the snap, when the public system was too overrun to let him attend classes and May had to move out of her one-bedroom to find a place to fit him again, he ended up spending upstate with Pepper and Morgan. It was a month of eating juice pops on the stairs, playing pretend in the backyard, answering Morgan’s endless questions — _How do birds stay up in the air? Why is the moon getting littler?  Why don’t you have a beard?_  — a month where time moved too fast and didn’t move at all.

 

But the ache of missing her is immediately strangled by the guilt, which he has come to understand over time will always be louder than everything else.

 

“Tell May she’s welcome too,” Pepper adds.  

 

“I will.” His voice cracks. His throat’s sore again, from not sleeping, from hollering at the NYPD not to shoot him, from he doesn’t even know what.

 

Pepper turns, angling herself so Morgan can’t see them. “Peter …”

 

“I’ve got — I’m — class,” he blurts.

 

Pepper nods, never once taking those eyes off of him. “Take care of yourself.”

 

 _Breathe in, breathe out._ “You guys too.”

 

“Bye Pete!” Morgan calls.

 

“Bye, squirt.”

 

Pepper lowers the phone and they both blow him a kiss, and he pretends to catch it and stumble back with the force. The call disconnects with Morgan’s giggles still ringing in his ear, a little lifeline a hundred miles away. The one person in his life who sees him as _Peter_ , and not as _Peter after the snap._ The one person who sees him as somebody whole, and not a piece of who he used to be.

 

He lowers the phone and shoves it into his coat pocket, only to realize he doesn’t have his coat. It’s early February, and cold enough that he can see his breath. He leans against the wall the physics building, taking a rare and quiet beat, trying to decide what to do.

 

 _Breathe in, breathe out_. It’s easy to do, when he’s thinking about it. But that’s the problem. The thinking about it. There’s no time to think anymore, only to _do_. Go to class. Go to his internship with Bruce. Patrol the city. Dodge the NYPD’s gunfire. Pretend he’s sleeping at night. Pretend he’s remembering to eat during the day. Pretend he’s okay with the little things, like looking up at the stars and learning about the relativity of time, when sometimes just hearing words like _stars_ and _time_ rattle some part of him he thought couldn’t be moved. Pretend he doesn’t still wake up in the middle of the night, fresh from the nightmare of the final battle, of the constant rhythm of _you failed, you failed, you failed._

 

A hand shoves something into his chest.

 

“You left this.”

 

His fist grips around the coat just before MJ drops it. He clutches it to himself, gaping at her in surprise. She stares back, then looks away so quickly that it feels like a hit-and-run.

 

“Thanks,” he says. And then, against all better judgment: “MJ, do you — “

 

“No.” The word comes out harsh enough to surprise them both. She stops herself, rocking on her heels, and just barely softens it when she adds, “I’ve got somewhere to be.”

 

Peter nods, wishing the pavement would swallow him whole. “Of course.”

 

The rest of the class starts spilling out of the building, and MJ is immediately swept into the crowd. Peter watches her go, holding onto his coat, holding onto things he should have known he was never allowed to keep.

 

* * *

 

“Peter, honey, your driver’s license expires next month. I can make you an appointment at the DMV? It’s just a few blocks from here. You could spend the night, maybe? A weekend? I feel like I haven’t seen you in ages. Call me back. I larb you.”

 

“Uh, dude? You haven’t been at the dorm in like? I don’t know, three days? I mean I saw you on the news — _sick_ move, tossing that grenade into the sewer — but just like, text a cowboy emoji or something so I know you’re alive. Also Betty says she’s stealing your graphing calculator since you do stuff in your head anyway and she’s not sorry.”  

 

“I called him and he didn’t pick up, the little shit. He told me he was coming. Can you try calling him? Watch him pick up the phone for you instead of — oh. Shit. Is it doing that voicemail thing again? Hang it up, bird brain. Stop laughing, it’s not — Peter, it’s Bucky. If you heard me call you a little shit it’s because I meant it. It’s game night. The hell are you?”  

 

“Peter, your vital signs are nearing critical levels. I recommend you remove yourself from the situation and contact Doctor Banner for assistance.”

 

Peter wheezes out a breath that is just as much Hudson River water as it is air. “I’m _fine_ , Karen.”

 

“Your current heart rate suggests — ”

 

_SLAM._

 

The car barrels into Peter so fast that he barely has the time to catch it. The mother driving and the two kids in the backseat are screaming their heads off, but Peter can’t barely hear it over the sound of his heartbeat slamming in his throat, his eyes, his fingertips — everything pulses, everything screams in hurt.

 

It isn’t usually like this. Most nights he can go into some kind of state, beyond pain, beyond reason — just _go, go, go_ , the way he was supposed then, and has taught himself to do now — but tonight is different. Mostly because tonight he’s already been thrown ten stories without being able to catch himself with his web shooters, plunged into the freezing Hudson, and immediately shot twice by the NYPD.

 

Okay. Fine. Maybe he could use some backup.

 

But what backup? Bucky, who is currently nursing a Monopoly board-sized grudge against him? Wanda, who is chilling in Norway with Valkyrie, according to an Instagram post Ned forwarded him not two hours ago? Sam, who is the literal, actual Captain fucking America right now, and has much better things to do than tag team a genetically-engineered sea monster that seems hellbent on destroying Chelsea Market on a Thursday night?

 

Aforementioned sea monster chooses that exact moment to interrupt Peter’s line of thought by thwacking its tail into him, sending him hurtling all the way over the High Line, soaring over 11th Avenue, and instead of back into the Hudson, crashing into some rich blow hard’s docked yacht.

 

“Fuck.”

 

The _fff_ of the word sprays out blood all over pristine hardwood floor of what looks like the inside of the yacht’s private bar. Peter stumbles to his feet, nearly knocked over by another seismic _thunk_ , the creature no doubt following him to make sure he finished Peter off. Peter takes the opportunity to pop the cork off an open bottle of something with his teeth and take a swig, hoping it will take some of the edge off of the multiple wounds and broken ribs now competing for his attention.

 

“ _Uck_.” It tastes like dish soap. “Why do rich people hate themselves?”

 

Another _crash_ rocks the water below, and Peter uses a web to project himself out of the broken window and up to the top of the yacht, trying to get a visual, trying to come up with some kind of plan.

 

The first thing he does is scan for civilians — down 11th Avenue, up on the elevated park, across it to where the late night bar crowd is usually lingering about now. Everyone seems to have cleared out, though. The one perk of living in a post-snap world: people get the fuck out of the way of danger now, and fast.

 

In the few seconds that takes, the sea monster lets out an impatient roar, its massive gills expanding and contracting.

 

“Jesus, Loch Ness,” Peter groans, squaring himself for the next round. “People are trying to _sleep_.”

 

Given a moment to strategize, though, Peter sees exactly how he’s going to end this fight — the gills give way to a soft, fleshy underbelly that he has a feeling the sea monster will not enjoy getting webbed up and tightened. He just has to get the thing to roar again so he has access. He leaps onto a slightly higher yacht (how is it seven years after the snap they _still_ have a billionaire problem?) to do just that, when he sees someone running down below.

 

“Crap. Karen, zoom.”

 

She does, so instantly that Peter thinks for a moment it must be a mistake. It looks just like Professor Howard, his physics teacher — except she’s in jeans and a t-shirt and staring right at him, despite the shadow of a thirty-foot river demon lurking behind her.

 

Peter presses a button on his wrist, the one that’s supposed to amplify his voice so he can tell her to get off of the scene, but by the time he looks up she’s gone.

 

“What the …”

 

 _THWACK_.

 

It hits him with a claw this time, not just knocking him aside, but shredding his arm to boot. He hoists himself out of the scraps of splintered wood and glass, forcing himself to push past the pain, to _focus_.

 

“Peter, vital signs are — ”

 

“Karen. Shut. _Up_.”

 

* * *

 

Twenty minutes later and the question isn’t so much what’s broken as it is what _isn’t_. He spends a good ten minutes wheezing in the shadows of the docks, watching the police and all the other related government entities who have been making his life utter hell come and haul off the sea monster’s corpse. He can practically feel his bones starting to knot themselves together again, his blood pumping furious in his veins, overheating him in his body’s attempt to heal as fast as possible.

 

He knows himself. He’s going to crash, and he can’t afford to do it here.

 

“Plot course to the tower.”

 

Karen doesn’t answer for a moment. “Given your current state, I suggest you summon one of the self-driving vehicles Doctor Banner has at his disposal — ”

 

“I’m banged up, Karen, not dead.”

 

Karen’s voice gets low and stern in that way Peter hates most, because it’s not really Karen. None of it is, really. It’s just that most of the time he can will himself to forget who she is, who she’s made of, who’s actually berating him on the other side.

 

Karen isn’t a machine. She’s a ghost. And Peter stopped listening to those a long time ago.

 

“The protocol you disabled earlier this month would have called Doctor Banner approximately thirty four minutes ago.”

 

Peter grabs a railing, unsteadily easing himself up to his feet. His ribs scream and the unhealed bullet holes ache into every nerve in his skin. He’s got to get those out before they fully close up, and Karen’s lectures aren’t helping.

 

“Yeah, well, thirty four minutes ago the _Shape of Water_ would have eaten several cars full of people alive, so.”

 

The tower is a good thirty blocks from here, which scraps the idea of going on foot. And if he summons one of those stupid self-driving cars Bruce will no doubt get some kind of alert and know Peter’s on his way, when all Peter really needs is access to the medbay to shove some gauze over his bleeding parts and guzzle enough water to replenish said blood. He doesn’t need to bother anybody. That was the whole point of disabling all the protocols, of making himself scarce — his business is his own. When other people get involved, they only get hurt.

 

He tentatively shoots a web up to the top of Chelsea Market’s roof with his good arm, swinging past the Google offices, the Gristede’s that got held up last year, working his way up 8th when the cars below are moving with the traffic and less likely to notice him. It’s strange, sometimes, heading back to the tower the way it is now — not Avengers Tower, but Stark Tower. Bruce had it renamed in Tony’s honor after Pepper gave him the building. Since then Bruce has been using it to house pioneers in medical research, helping fund all kinds of efforts and providing a place for the best minds in the world to get together and work on them.

 

Also providing a place for Peter to hide when he ends up getting ripped to shreds by knockoff Godzilla.

 

He’s made it about a block away from the tower when it happens — the crash. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it hurts like a bitch. First the adrenaline wears off, then and everything falls apart at once. His head starts spinning, the edges of his vision go black, his stomach swoops somewhere below his feet and knocks off his balance. He makes a desperate bid for the tower, shooting a web as far as it can go. It connects, and Peter closes his eyes, hoping gravity will be on his side, and — 

 

 _Slam._  A Peter Parker-shaped blood stain on the glass. Just before he starts to fall he feels a twinge of guilt for Veronica, whose office window he just turned into a horror movie, but then he’s sliding down, down, down, another twenty stories before Karen goes ahead and deploys the parachute just in time for Peter to drift into an open dumpster.

 

“Thanks,” he manages, begrudgingly.

 

“Don’t mention it.”

 

Peter’s untangling himself from the parachute and trying to keep himself from hyperventilating when it happens. He stumbles out of the dumpster, and straight into someone who has evidently been running, someone who must have heard the crash or seen him fall. Peter closes his eyes, not sure what he dreads more, opening them to a freaked out Bruce or a member of the NYPD. What happens instead is much worse.

 

What happens instead is Tony Stark.

 

Peter’s breath catches in his throat, and he crushes his eyes shut again, he does a self-check. Limbs — mostly intact. Head — pounding, but lucid. Heart — thudding louder than it ever has before.

 

There’s a hand on his shoulder. “Kid?”

 

The word is like some kind of key, opening some part of him that rushes out in an ugly, unrelenting torrent. Peter’s eyes fly open again, and there Tony is, just staring at him, his face in full scowl.

 

“Um — so — funny story,” says Tony. “I am at least 98 percent sure I’m in the wrong timeline. Does the Peter in this one not speak, or …?”

 

Peter backs up, wrenching his arm away from the man, his tears so thick that they’re mixing with the blood in his mask and stinging his eyes. He’s not sure what’s worse: the suffocation of his grief brought back to the surface, or the fact that this means he is finally well and truly losing his mind.

 

“Shit. Kid. You’re bleeding a fucking geyser. Okay, okay — we’ll uh, stick a few Band-Aids on that, and then maybe you could direct me to the nearest — ”

 

Peter doesn’t even bother aiming, just shoots his web out and lets his body go in the direction of where it lands. He hits the air and flies, away from the tower, away from his nightmare, away from the eyes of his own personal ghost.


	2. Chapter 2

“Dude. Are you _drunk_ right now?”

 

Peter can only hear Ned because super powers. The rest of this apartment is wall-to-wall noise — drunk people shouting, couples hooking up in every dimly lit corner, the speakers blasting, for a reason Peter cannot even begin to fathom, Hannah Montana’s “Hoedown Throwdown.”

 

Peter takes another swig of his jungle juice and does not bother lying. “Extremely.”

 

“Shit,” says Ned, with a smile that is both broad and wary. “I’m like — not sure if you’re real or not? Have I ever actually seen you drunk?  Or like, at a party before?”

 

“I’m too intoxicated to take offense to that.”

 

Ned hovers over Peter for a moment, like he’s going to ask if he’s okay. Peter waves him off before he can and says, “Woo! Living an integrated life!” because even though it is a very dumb thing to say, it is still exponentially better than _Woo! I had a startlingly real hallucination about my dead pseudo-father figure and I’m putting copious amounts of alcohol in my body to forget!_

 

Ned claps Peter on the back, at which point Peter realizes that Ned is also quite drunk, because he mostly ends up clapping the couch cushion. “I’m gonna go find Betty. Don’t move.”

 

Peter sucks down another sip. It tastes sharp and burns all the way down, but at least it gets a little less worse every time he drinks. “Wasn’t planning on it.”

 

Within a minute Ned abandoning him, a girl sits down next to him. “So you’re cute.”

 

Peter is mid-swig of his jungle juice, and nearly chokes on it.

 

“Tell me,” she says, leaning in. “Van or kept?”

 

This is a normal question. It’s so normal that it’s an option on dating apps now — indicating whether you were “vanished” or “kept” after the snap. It used to throw Peter for a loop, and maybe it would now, if there weren’t six cups of might just be pure vodka mixed with Red Bull swirling in his nervous system.

 

“Kept,” he lies, because he can tell she was. People only ever ask if they were. The vanished tend not to bring it up. There’s almost a weird kind of shame to it — they didn’t stick around for the suffering. They just got to come back into a post-suffering world.

 

She sidles in closer to him. She smells like coconut shampoo. “Thought so.”

 

“Yeah?”

 

She nods. “You always look so … I dunno. Damaged?”

 

Peter blinks. He has never spoken to this girl in his life.

 

“Why is that?” she asks.

 

The girl’s eyes are glassy, her heart rate at a lull, her body slump against his. Blackout drunk. She’s not going to remember this in the morning, and if Peter has his way, neither will he.

 

“Well, I accidentally went to space, and died on another planet. I can’t go to sleep without having nightmares about a massive purple alien. The only girl I’ve ever loved refuses to speak to me, and my aunt thinks I’m losing it, and I’m starting to think she might be right.” His eyelids are so heavy. Everything is heavy. “And also I watched my uncle and lifelong hero die in front of me, and I’m pretty sure both of those things were my fault, so. That about sums it up.”

 

There’s a beat. Then she starts to laugh, and then Peter’s laughing too, and then he excuses himself to go throw up in the bathroom.

 

When he leaves a few minutes later the night air is so icy it feels like a slap. Peter drags the trash bag out to the bin on the curb, trying to remember if he elected to take the trash out or if someone handed it to him on his way out, but it doesn’t matter. The trash is trash and now it’s in the Big Trash, and it will go wherever the trash people take it, probably to some big trash island somewhere — 

 

“Oof.”

 

Another thunk on his chest. A familiar one. He looks up into MJ’s scowling eyes, and looks down at his coat, yet again in her hands.

 

‘If you’re going to keep pulling a Cinderella with this stupid coat, at least do it on nights that won’t turn you into a sentient popsicle.”

 

It’s more consecutive words than she’s said to him in six months. Peter takes the coat from her, only just realizing that he’s shivering with embarrassing violence, and shoves his arms into the sleeves. Except his arms aren’t sleeve-shaped anymore, or maybe the sleeves are broken, or maybe _he’s_ just broken, because it won’t go on the way it usually — 

 

MJ grabs the coat and unceremoniously yanks it into place. “You’re wasted.”

 

Peter stares, surprised that MJ is even still standing there. Or maybe he’s just hallucinating her too.

 

He’s thought about a moment like this for so long — a moment to tell her how he feels, to apologize, to try to find some common ground — but instead it’s like his brain tips over and spills out the least helpful things it has in it.

 

“You were amazing as Kate. Really amazing. Sorry. Just … ” He gestures unhelpfully at the air between them, not even sure which part he’s apologizing for, not even sure if this conversation is happening.

 

Her eyes hit the pavement. “You came?”

 

Peter nods. Around Christmas MJ was Kate in Empire State’s production of _Taming of the Shrew_. She was visceral and stunning, moving with the kind of force that didn’t just command attention, but demanded it. Even from the back row of the dingy, badly lit theater, it was the most transcendent thing he’d ever seen — like she could move mountains just casting her eyes on the audience, like she could crackle lightning from her fingertips.

 

“Peter …”

 

“I’m sorry.” He should take a step back but he’s not entirely confident in his ability not to trip. “Is that weird? I’m sorry.”

 

MJ rocks her weight back onto her heels. “It’s not weird.”

 

“It feels weird.”

 

“I mean yeah, it’s fucking weird you didn’t tell me you came.”

 

Peter stares at her, all these edges of her made so precise in the harsh light of the streetlamp, the curve of her cheek and the gleam in her eyes and that way her eyebrows soften just for him. “I thought you’d be mad.”

 

The scowl is back in full form. “I am mad.”

 

“I know.” And then, because he knows he won’t be able to say it in the light of day: “I really miss you.”

 

MJ blows out a breath. “Shit, Peter.”

 

“I’m — ”

 

“If you say sorry one more time, I swear to fucking god.”

 

“Sor — crap.”

 

This earns him the barest of smiles. She reaches out and puts a hand on his shoulder. He wills himself not to close his eyes, not to try to memorize everything about this moment, and just be in it instead. The memory will never live up to the real thing anyway. That’s a lesson he has learned too many times to count.

 

“You were the one who broke up with me, Peter.”

 

His eyes are stinging. His throat is thick. “I know.”

 

“I know you know. The same way I know you did it because you’re a class A self-sacrificing idiot, and you’re going to eventually come to your senses about how deeply you have underestimated my capacity to handle your superhero bullshit and what a colossal, ridiculous mistake you’ve made, and come begging at my dorm room window for me to take you back.”

 

God, he loves her. More than he’s ever loved anyone or anything. The enormity of it scares him. It can’t be weighed, can’t be measured — it certainly can’t ever be held.

 

She tilts her head at him, and it feels like she’s tilting the axis of his world with it. “But until then … we can’t be … whatever this is. Okay?”

 

Peter swipes at his face with the sleeve of his coat. “Okay.”

 

She squeezes his shoulder before she lets it go. “Don’t fuck yourself up too much in the meantime,” she says, which is the closest to saying _I love you_ as she is going to get.

 

* * *

 

 

He starts to wander home, or at least in some vague direction of it. He entertains the idea of hopping on the L train and pestering Bucky, but stumbling into his bachelor pad as an underage drunk does not seem like a good look. He considers Bruce, too, and then un-considers it remembering what happened at the tower the night before. He even considers going home to May, before common sense kicks in and he remembers that seeing him like this would probably break her heart.

 

Fine, then. To the dorms it is.

 

Or a least, that’s his intention, when another Parker-Napping Incident starts to unfurl. This is the admittedly uncreative name Peter has given to the bizarre trend of bad guys trying to kidnap him — not _Spider-Man_ , but literal, actual Peter Parker. Someone trying to get revenge on Sam, or revenge on Bruce, or revenge on Bucky. That’s the thing about publicly hanging out with your superhero friends without secret identities. You get a target on your back for all kinds of bullshit. Bullshit like the fancy car that just rolled up beside him, instantly turned itself into some kind of massive weapon, and projected a menacing voice that told him to get in the car if he wanted to live.

 

Peter stares at it for a moment. “I’m so drunk. Could we … just … not.”

 

Then the fucking thing shoots at him, which, _typical_. Fucking typical. He poises himself to dodge it, then do what Ned taken to calling one of his “Bitch You Thought” maneuvers, using his abilities to disable their weapons and leave them for the NYPD before a bystander so much as notices something amiss.

 

But this is not any other night. This is a night where his heart is heavy trying to pump Smirnoff and existential despair. This is a night where he’s still not fully healed from the shit show of taking down a sea monster 20 hours before.

 

This is the night where he hears the unmistakable sound of Iron Man’s repulsors above, and he can’t help but turn his head.

 

The distraction costs him. Whatever weird energy blast the weapon emits hits him square in the chest, and knocks him into a bodega with enough force that the brick of building’s wall crumbles on impact. Peter gasps, or at least his dumb, drunk lungs try to, only to discover the wind’s been completely knocked out of him.

 

And then … and then …

 

Peter blinks, and the blink seems to take ten years. He’s not even sure if his eyelids are moving, except that he can’t see and then he can — it’s as if he’s gotten ten times drunker than he was in the time it took for him to hit the wall.

 

The blast. Whatever it was. He can still feel the crackle of it sapping his energy, leeching consciousness out of him. A hand is wrapped around the scruff of his neck, hauling him to his feet.

 

God dammit. Karen’s not even activated to tattle on him. And the truth is, between dodging May, dodging Ned, and dodging Bruce, if he really does get Parker-napped right now, nobody’s going to think to come looking for his stupid ass for days.

 

He uses the last of his strength to try and wriggle out of the guy’s grasp, which earns him the kind of hit to the head that makes his vision go black for a moment. He’s so stunned by the pain and by the lack of oxygen that he doesn’t hear the thrusters disengage, doesn’t see the red glint of armor, doesn’t realize what’s about to happen until it’s already happening.

 

“I know for a fact that underage drunk does not belong to you. Fork him over and I might consider letting you keep that hand.”

 

There’s a beat, and Peter’s would-be kidnapper steals the words right out of his mouth: “What the fuck? Are you supposed to be Iron Man?”

 

“The one and only.”  There’s a whistling noise, and the hand around Peter’s neck drops, and then so does Peter. “Well — I guess not only. Time got a little less linear for me yesterday.”

 

Bucky’s whole _breathe it in, breathe it out_ thing would be extremely helpful right now, if Peter’s lungs didn’t just ghost him. That’s just it, though. Whatever it was that hit him, it’s bones, it’s muscle, it’s the blood in his veins — everything’s stalled, heavy, immovable. He feels himself fading, and for the first time he can remember in years, feeling a genuine trickle of fear. It surprises him. He thought he’d gotten over being scared of death by now.

 

“Kid. Hey, kid, look at me.”

 

Someone —  _Iron Man_ — is crouching beside him. For a moment Peter is almost glad he’s hallucinating. If this were real it’d be the most embarrassing moment of his …

 

“ _Hey_. Look alive here, Pete. Can you … FRIDAY, what the hell was he hit with?”

 

Another moment passes, or maybe ten, or maybe all of the moments he’ll ever have. He feels himself slipping, somewhere too dark to be sleep, but Tony shakes him by the shoulder and says, “Nope, not on my watch,” and maybe that’s that. Maybe not being dead is as simple as Tony Stark saying “no.”

 

* * *

 

 

Peter wakes up and even without opening his eyes, immediately knows he is somewhere he is not supposed to be. First of all, it is way too quiet. Sixtieth floor of a building quiet. No undergrads crying in the rec room or passive-aggressively texting their long-distance partners or drunkenly singing in the shower quiet. Quiet like he’s never heard in this city before.

 

That, and his head is pounding, and every one of his limbs feels like there are stones on top of them. His tongue feels like someone rolled sandpaper onto the roof of his mouth. He tries to swallow, and his throat is so dry that he nearly gags on not having any spit, and when he briefly squints he sees pristine white walls of a building that is definitely way too bougie for him to set foot in, let alone be on the verge of dry-heaving in.

 

A shadow crosses the room. A woman. He really did hallucinate Tony again, then. Whatever he was hit with just fully knocked the last shred of sanity out of him.

 

“I know you’re awake.”

 

“I know you know,” he says. He sounds like shit. Almost as bad as he feels. “Just trying to figure out how to burst your bubble.”

 

The woman’s voice is wry. “Burst my bubble?”

 

“You kidnapped someone with no money, no clout, and almost no chance of anyone offering any goods in exchange for their safe return — assuming this is a hostage situation. Sorry. I should have asked.”

 

There’s a long pause, interrupted only by the shadow of someone sitting down in front of him, the rustle of her easing into a chair.

 

“I’ll take that as a _you’re welcome_ for helping save your ass last night.”

 

As far as the usual kidnapper-kidnappee interactions go, this has already deviated pretty far from the usual script. Peter pops an eye open.

 

“ _Professor?_ ”

 

Except Professor Howard doesn’t look like Professor Howard. Or, for that instance, like someone who would kidnap a broke, drunk, hallucinating undergraduate, and set him up on a cushy couch in a high rise apartment worth more than his life. She just looks like …

 

Peter blinks. There’s a moment when she looks almost like she’s smirking. There’s a moment when she looks almost like —

 

No. Of course she looks familiar. She teaches his physics class. He’s just thrown off seeing her outside of the lecture, seeing her in a pair of jeans and an oversized MIT sweatshirt. And also thrown off by the fact that, unless his ears are on the fritz, she appears to be the only other living thing in his gigantic penthouse of an apartment where he just barely regained consciousness.

 

“Actually,” she says, “my name is Morgan.”

 

She’s expecting him to make the connection as fast as he does, but Peter isn’t. The whiplash is immediate. Searing. He sits up so fast that his head spins, staring at her, but more importantly staring at the _not_ -her — at Pepper’s warm, wide eyes. At Tony’s ghost of a smirk. At the cocky, near sheepish posture that could only ever belong to someone with the last name Stark.

 

This can only mean one thing.

 

“Tell me you didn’t — ”

 

“Sure did,” she says, with this sad, rueful smile.

 

No. Peter’s had enough of this. His universe is already too big as it is — it always has been. This cavernous hole that his parents left behind, that’s only gotten wider with every other person he’s lost since. The aftermath of the spider bite, and how it heightened every moment since — being able to hear everything, to anticipate anything, to sense danger that most people can’t even see.

 

And then — the void of space. The tangle of time. There is no forward or back or even in-between. No rhyme or order or reason. It’s moments like this that he wonders what the point of anything is at all.

 

He opens his eyes, not even sure when he crushed them shut.

 

“You’re _six._ ”

 

Her head cocks to the side in a manner that’s so uncannily _Tony_ that Peter shivers. “Give or take … thirty years.”

 

There is no room for disbelief. Even if he wasn’t fully aware of the _why_ or the _how_ , there is something deeper than any answer she can give him — that same connection they had the moment they first met. That soul-deep kind of recognition. This is Morgan. More to the point, this is _his_ Morgan. He may not have been able to see it half-napping in the back row of a lecture hall, but looking into those eyes, it’s undeniable now.

 

“Are you — okay?” he asks.

 

Because if she’s here — if something’s gone wrong — that can only mean one thing: that somewhere in the future, Peter isn’t where he’s supposed to be. Somewhere in the future, Peter let Morgan Stark down.

 

She looks away from him, at the floor, and that’s all he needs to confirm it. That one, simple beat. The understanding is crushing. Unbearable.

 

Then she clears her throat, looking back up. He can tell from the way her eyes immediately soften that every horrific thought funneling through his head is written all over his face.

 

“Yeah. Yes. I’m fine,” she says, quick and almost reflexive. Like she’s said it to him a thousand times before, because he’s asked a thousand times before. It’s the only relief he can hold onto, because he recognizes that tone, the cadence of it — it’s the same one he used all those times Tony asked him the exact same thing.

 

“But I need your help.”

 

Before he even knows what he’s saying, the word comes tumbling out his mouth: “Anything.”

 

Something gives way in her expression, cracks and then sews itself back up so fast that Peter isn’t sure whether he imagined it or not. Then she says, “A lot of stuff got fucked up, and we unfucked most of it, except for this — Tony Stark is stuck in a time rift. He keeps oscillating between your present day and his. I need your help putting him back where he belongs.”


	3. Chapter 3

Peter’s chest is too tight to breathe. He blinks at Morgan, willing his face not to burn, his eyes not to prick with tears. He’s been so careful in front of her, these past few years. Good days only. There is a small, insistent portion of his brain that just barely manages to keep him in order, and being someone Morgan can depend on is 90 percent of what keeps it running. 

 

“Shit,” she says, seeing past him in an instant. “You’re a baby in this time.” 

 

“I’m —  _ you’re _ the baby,” he says dumbly. He tries to stand, but is still a little too woozy to pull it off. She scowls at him, muttering something that sounds a lot like  _ stubborn as ever _ , and pushes him back down on the couch. “You ate a freaking  _ nickel _ last week.” 

 

She turns her back on him, staring out the window. He supposes she is giving him a second to collect himself. For some reason it makes it even harder to do. 

 

“Mr. — Tony. The Tony I’ve been seeing. He’s not … he’s real?” 

 

Her movements are abrupt, bordering on fidgety, but her voice is warm — the  _ Tony and Pepper _ -ness of her is staggering. He is angry with himself for not seeing it before, but even in the fog of his injuries, he understands that Morgan didn’t let him. She possesses a skill that neither of her parents ever did: she’s good at lying. 

 

Even understanding this, though, he understands that from here on out, she is through lying to him. 

 

“Yeah, he is. And being a real pain in the ass about it,” she says, blowing a flyaway hair out of her face. Off of Peter’s stunned look, she says, “We — I needed him for something. I knew it would be too messy if I used the Tony in our timeline, so I used one of Cap’s.” 

 

“One of?” Peter asks weakly. 

 

Morgan waves a dismissive hand. “You’ll be an expert on this within ten years.” 

 

“Oh.” Peter feels faint. “Good.” 

 

Morgan’s pacing again. 

 

“I ran into trouble, though. The kind of trouble that caused one impressively inconvenient rift,” she says. “It spat me out into last summer in this timeline, and I’ve been waiting for it to spit Tony out ever since, so I could put him back where he goes — ”

 

“So he’s alive?” Peter interrupts. “I mean — in another timeline. He lives through Thanos?” 

 

Morgan turns to him sharply. “Don’t. I know that moony look.” 

 

“But — ”

 

“Do you trust me, Pete?” 

 

He doesn’t even blink. “Of course.” 

 

Her words are capped with steel. “Then trust me on this: Tony has to stay dead in your timeline.” 

 

Peter holds her gaze, but he doesn’t nod, doesn’t let himself say a word. The trouble isn’t whether or not he trusts Morgan. It’s whether he trusts himself. 

 

He tries to steady himself, tries to cut a path through the fog of his brain. “So you’ve been … just waiting in the wrong time for months. For Mr. Stark to show up, so you could find him and put him back.” 

 

“Yes. Keep up, Pete,” she says, thrusting a mug of coffee in his hands, seemingly out of thin air. “Or shit, those assholes hit your head, didn’t they? That was my bad. In the original version of these events, your regular, sober self webbed them up and went about your business — ”

 

“But in this one — ”

 

“Dear old dad tried to play hero and distracted you, so you got KO’d. Then he got sucked back into the rift and left me to pry you up off the sidewalk,” says Morgan. “You’re welcome, by the way.” 

 

Peter can’t keep up. Maybe he doesn’t want to. It feels like there’s this part of himself he has worked so tirelessly to keep in — the kind of feeling he knows he can’t get rid of, but thinks he might one day tame. The kind of feeling that has every bit as much of a chance of saving him as it does destroying him. The kind of feeling he wishes he didn’t just reach out and skim the edges of long enough to give it a name: hope. 

 

He knows he can’t have Tony back. He  _ knows _ that. But here Tony is anyway. If they’ve broken one rule … if there really  _ are _ other timelines, the way she says … why can’t he learn from the other Peters in them? The ones who managed to keep the people he loves alive? 

 

He gulps down the coffee, burning his throat but not the thought. Then something else occurs to him. 

 

“So — you were there last night. How did you know to be …” Peter shakes his head. This is only a small piece of a much larger picture, one that his brain isn’t piecing together as fast as it usually does.  “My school. Have you been pretending to be a professor there because of me? You really think  _ I _ can help you put Tony back? I — I don’t know anything about Cap’s timelines, at least not yet, I — ”

 

“For once, Peter, I don’t need you for your brawn  _ or _ your big brain,” says Morgan, finally settling down on the arm of the couch. “And yeah, you better believe I’ve been stalking your scrawny ass, if that’s what you’re asking.”  

 

“Down by the docks — when that Kraken wannabe was trying to finish me — ”

 

“You spotted me that time, which, my bad. Got preoccupied trying not to become a pancake.” Before he can ask why she didn’t do anything to help, she adds, “I’ve been waiting for all the times you’re in action in this timeline, because I figure it’s my best bet at finding Tony.” She gives him a wry look. “No matter what timeline we were in trying to fix the shit with the Time Stone, one thing stayed the same: if you were in trouble, he’d always show up.” 

 

Peter freezes, the coffee cup inches from his mouth. 

 

“You’ve been … using me as bait.” 

 

“Oh, absolutely. I still am.” 

 

He isn’t breathing, but it’s a choice. Like the breathing will distract him from fully sinking into the nightmare of what she just said, when he deserves to feel it in all of its ugly force. He’s always known it’s his fault that Tony is dead. That Morgan doesn’t have a father. That the people around him — his parents, his uncle, his mentor — they are the ones who get hurt. Hasn’t he spent these last two years coming to terms with exactly that? Doing everything he can to stop it from ever happening again? 

 

And now Morgan is here, exploiting the worst thing about him. The thing he hates about himself most. The fact that he is a hero second, and a burden first. The fact that no matter how many people he saves, he will never undo the damage he’s already done. 

 

“I mean, in an  _ ideal _ scenario, I would have been in and out of here by now — used the particles to get Tony back where he goes, and been on my merry way — but then I almost got you murdered, and that feels … y’know. Counterproductive.” 

 

Morgan darts up off the couch again, giving Peter the impression that, like her parents, she’s never in one place for too long. There is a sense that she doesn’t quite belong in any space or time, maybe — like she is not quite at home anywhere, let alone here in her own past. Like maybe she’s running too. It makes Peter ache in the way he has always ached for her; it’s made even worse because he doesn’t know this version of her well enough to understand what she’s running from. 

 

“And with Tony fading in and out of the rift, he’s proving to be one wily coyote to track down,” says Morgan. “But now, at least, I have your help. Cooperative bait, so we can get this whole thing done quicker.” 

 

Now Peter breathes. It hurts more than the not breathing. It hurts because he has to do the one thing he promised himself he never would: let Morgan Stark down. 

 

“Morgan, I — I’m sorry.” 

 

She tilts her head. “Why?” 

 

“I can’t help you.” 

 

“Uh, come again, tiny version of Pete?” 

 

Peter’s eyes burn. He stares into the murky coffee, his body giving way to something, but his resolve hardening. 

 

“Listen. If you know that — in too many timelines, Tony tries to save me. Then you know that … in too many timelines, it probably costs him his life.” His eyes snap up to meet hers, and his look stuns the scowl right off her face. “I’m not going to let Tony die because of me again.” 

 

“Whoa. There is a  _ lot _ to unpack there that I don’t feel responsible enough to touch — like,  _ damn _ .” Morgan shakes her head, more to herself than to him. She’s broken eye contact with him, gone somewhere he doesn’t know — how strange, that this Morgan has lived an entire life beyond him that  _ he doesn’t know _ — before she turns back to him. “I don’t have time to wait for when you eventually unfuck your way out of your very misplaced survivor’s guilt, so let me just say this: we’re trying to  _ save _ this Tony.” 

 

His fingers clench around the cup. He has to remind himself not to break it. That’s the problem with feeling, in his body — he’s never allowed to let it be fully felt. 

 

“Find another way.” 

 

“Uh, or we could go with the easy way.”

 

“You don’t understand.” 

 

Her eyes blaze. “Try me.” 

 

“Morgan — ”

 

“You think I don’t doubt myself sometimes?” Morgan asks. She’s not in his face anymore, pointedly keeping her distance, but the effect of her words is so strong that she might as well be. “You think I haven’t lost people? You think I wouldn’t do anything to — ”

 

“I’m sorry,” Peter says, his voice wretched. Because he  _ knows _ what she’s lost. And he knows who’s to blame. “Shit — I’m — I’m sorry.” 

 

“ _ Peter _ .”  

 

That’s all she says. Just his name. But he hears so much more in it than he’s ever heard before. It’s not just,  _ Wait _ . It’s not just,  _ Please _ . It’s both of those things and more — it’s an entire history of shared moments with her that she’s already had and he feels cheated from. But whatever it is, it’s not enough to stop him from stumbling to his feet, from limping to the elevator, from taking the forty-six floors down to the lobby and spilling out into the too-bright midwinter sun. It’s not enough to make him do what he knows, deep in some incurable part of him, he probably should. 

 

* * *

 

 

“You’re gonna get stung, you little shit.” 

 

Peter hovers on the edge of the rooftop. “What’s the super healing for if not an angry bee hoard?” 

 

“Not worried about you. Worried about the bees,” says Bucky. Except when he turns around, diverting his attention from said bees in the semi-illegal hive he’s keeping on top of his Brooklyn building, he says, “But now I’m worried about you.” 

 

Peter laughs weakly, and Bucky’s scowl only deepens. He juts his chin toward the stairwell. “Get inside and wait for me in there, will you? I’m sick of your phantoming.” 

 

“It’s ghosting,” Peter corrects him, narrowly avoiding running into another one of Bucky’s mini hives.  

 

“It’s bullshit.” 

 

Peter doesn’t move, watching Bucky carefully slide one of the wider drawers back into the box where all the honeybees are clustered for winter. Peter likes to come up here sometimes and stare at them. Maybe because he’s just trying to find whatever peace it is that Bucky does when he’s up here. Whatever it is, if Peter ever finds it, it doesn’t last long. 

 

Bucky turns back, exasperated that Peter isn’t listening, and this time he sees something in Peter’s eyes that make his own fall. 

 

“I’ve … I’ve got some questions,” says Peter, his voice tight. 

 

Bucky searches his face for a moment, and then a resignation settles in his own. He lets out a sigh and says, “I’ve got some fucked up answers. I just don’t know if they’re the ones you want to hear.” 

 

A few minutes later Peter is sitting on Bucky’s couch, holding the Grumpy Cat mug Sam bought him a few years back, ignoring the tea piping out of it and making the apartment smell like an orange blossom. The place is expansive — when Steve came back, he’d amassed something of a fortune, and paid for this apartment for Bucky and Sam outright. It was meant to be something of a mini-Avengers tower, a meetup space that was less for business and more for comfort, but Peter has been notoriously bad at dropping by.

 

“When Cap came back — I mean, when he caught up to our timeline …” Peter starts, but doesn’t know how to finish. The truth is that he knows very little about what happened. Hasn’t even seen the older version of Steve Rogers with his own eyes. Bucky and Sam communicate with him every now and then, but Peter has never had a good reason to be in touch, and it always seemed presumptuous to even ask. 

 

“He didn’t ‘come back,’” says Bucky. “The new version — he was in our timeline all along. The Cap you knew and the older Cap we have now. Coexisting.” 

 

Peter’s head feels like a batting cage. 

 

“Drink your damn tea,” Bucky grumbles. 

 

Peter does, and it helps. This. The being here, surrounded by things he knows — the throw pillows Sam bought to “make the place look less like IKEA jail.” The faint rings on the hardwood table where Wanda puts her coffee mugs. The unicorn calendar Valkyrie hung up in the kitchen area during one of her quick dropins that nobody has bothered to change since last July. The little carvings by the pantry where Peter started measuring Morgan every time she comes to visit. 

 

_ Morgan _ . His chest tightens. 

 

“You know about the other timelines, then.” 

 

If Bucky is surprised that Peter knows, he doesn’t show it. Instead he takes a sip of his own tea and scowls into it. “Yeah. I’m assuming if you do that something’s already happened to mess with one of them.” 

 

“You could say that.” 

 

Bucky blows out a breath. Peter asks the question he’s been scared to ask. 

 

“Why do I have a feeling that Cap’s timelines have less to do with Cap and more to do with me?” 

 

Bucky’s smile is grim, but has this tinge of pride to it. He’s appointed himself an older brother of sorts to Peter in the past few years, something that Peter still hasn’t quite let himself appreciate, seeing as it goes against every screaming impulse to keep people at arm’s length. Still, Peter finds he can’t help it — like a moth drawn to a flame, a magnet to steel — he’s not strong enough on his own. He needs this grounding force. 

 

He hates himself for it. 

 

“Look, punk. I don’t really have a lot of details. Steve kept them out intentionally — said it would affect too much, if any of us knew.” 

 

He leans forward, holding Peter’s gaze. Checking him, in that way he always seems to do — measuring the state of him, making sure he can handle what’s coming next, if he’s even handling what came before. It’s why Peter has never been able to get shit past him, and certainly won’t now. 

 

“But yes. There are other timelines. A whole multiverse — the event with Thanos exposed us to it, the way other timelines’ versions of Thanos exposed them to it too. It’s messy, and it’s complicated, but … it’s a shit show we’re a part of now, for better or worse.” 

 

“A shit show where — where Tony’s alive?” 

 

He tries to ask it casually, but there’s not a casual bone left in his body. 

 

“And plenty of others where he isn’t,” Bucky confirms. “Others where I’m dead, or you’re dead, or none of us ever existed — ”

 

“In the ones where I’m dead, is Tony — ”

 

“Peter.” 

 

Bucky’s yelled at Peter before. One time when Peter put himself directly in the line of fire to shield him from a bullet. Another when Peter broke his phone and didn’t answer May’s calls for three days and Bucky tracked him down in a back alley, holding his own phone to Peter’s mouth so he could let her know he was okay (and then taking him back to the apartment and locking him in a room to sleep, because he wasn’t). Even a few times at game night, because Peter may have bad luck everywhere else, but has uncanny luck at Scrabble. 

 

But he’s never yelled at him like this. Not with this arresting, thundering  _ clap _ of fear and rage, like Peter is a child who put his hand on a burning pot, or walked out into traffic. 

 

“Don’t you dare finish that sentence. Don’t you dare.” 

 

But Peter is long past finishing that sentence. Peter’s written the whole book, read it reread it — it’s his bedtime story, his bible, his nightmare, his dream. If he could give his life for Tony’s he’d do it before he could even draw one breath. 

 

He lifts his head and Bucky’s lips thin into a grim line. 

 

“You’re not ready.” 

 

Peter’s chest feels concave. “Ready for  _ what? _ ” 

 

Bucky takes a breath. “I’m not trying to scare you. But if Steve is right, there’s a lot of shit coming, and you’re going to be pretty damn central to it.” 

 

Peter closes his eyes, just for a moment. Because it won’t make a difference, really, if shit is coming. When hasn’t it been? He doesn’t even know if he’d recognize trouble on the horizon now, because trouble is his constant state. 

 

“The shit’s already here,” he says. “There’s a version of Tony from another timeline wandering in and out of ours. He was caught in a rift. And Morgan — an older version of her — she’s here. She’s been here. And she’s been trying to get him back.” 

 

He’d be satisfied by how genuinely stunned Bucky looks, if it didn’t mean what Peter thinks it means — this was not part of Steve’s grand design, or at least not anything he was warned about in advance. 

 

Then Bucky stands up without warning, grabs his coat, and heads toward the door. 

 

“Uh …” 

 

Bucky rounds on him. “Stay here.” 

 

“What?” 

 

“Stay. Here,” he says, pointing at the couch Peter is sitting on. “I’m going to talk to Steve, and if you are gone when I get back, I swear on every single one of those LEGOs you and your dweeby friend left on the floor the other week, I will make you regret it. Understood?” 

 

Bucky takes the stunned look on Peter’s face as affirmation, and then the door slams, and Peter is alone. 

 

* * *

 

Peter doesn’t mean to fall asleep. He has trouble enough doing it intentionally that doing it accidentally is a foreign concept to him now. It’s why he’s very unprepared to wake up to the sound of someone saying his name — and far more unprepared to open his eyes to one Tony Stark. 

 

“Ah, thank you for gracing me with your consciousness, alternate dimension version of Peter.” 

 

Peter scrambles up to his feet so fast that the mug he still had clasped in his hands goes flying. Tony looks at the smashed remnants of it with mild alarm, and then back at Peter. 

 

“Nice to see you too. Glad to see you’re okay after …” He looks Peter up and down. “Well, using the term ‘okay’ extremely loosely.” 

 

Peter lets out a weak laugh. He doesn’t know what else to do. He can’t stop staring at him, the wholeness, the  _ aliveness _ of him — it’s terrifying how fast he can feel some part of him slipping into an old skin.  _ Mr. Stark is here, and everything’s going to be okay _ . 

 

“Seriously, kid, what’s in the water in this timeline? You look like you just snuck out of an ensemble number in Les Mis.” 

 

Tony peering at Peter with obvious concern, his eyes narrowed like he’s trying to hone in on something. Peter stares back at him, resisting all of the urges that flood him at once — to tell him he’s sorry. To tell him he’s missed him. To hug him, like the stupid, blathering kid he just discovered he didn’t kill nearly as effectively as he should have by now. 

 

“Mr. Stark, I — ”

 

“Tony.” He corrects Peter so fast that they both startle; that there’s no coming back from it, or any of the questions it erupted into the room. “You haven’t called me ‘Mr. Stark’ in eons.” 

 

Peter’s mouth opens. Closes. He doesn’t know what the rules are with this, how much any of them are and aren’t allowed to know. But the longer the silence goes on, the more unbearable it is, until Peter drops his eyes and mumbles, “We never really got to that point.” 

 

Tony lets out a low breath. “Kid …” 

 

Peter swallows, hard. “I need to — you’re supposed to be — back in the other timeline. I’ve got to … I know how to get you back.” 

 

The answer is simple: find Morgan. He’ll start at her office at Empire State, then go to the apartment he just left, and fan out from there. 

 

But he gets up so fast that the room spins. He tries to keep walking, to just push through it — he just barely staggers, before the room starts to right itself — but it doesn’t matter. Tony has already caught him by the arm, already stopped him in his tracks. 

 

“The multiverse will survive for eight seconds without its most obnoxious Avenger.” 

 

Peter blinks, his eyes burning. Tony’s hand is still wrapped around his elbow, waiting for him to turn back and look at him, but he can’t. 

 

“Talk to me, Pete.” 

 

Peter takes a shuddering, unfair breath — all these years he has practiced at this. At keeping himself in check, of keeping his face at a safe neutral, of keeping his hands at his sides, feet firm on the floor. Those first few months — crumbling in front of Happy, dodging questions from May, trying his best to shrug off all of Bucky’s early attempts to reach out — he made a decision. He would rein all of the pain in. Crush it, compact it, bury it so deep inside of himself that it wouldn’t burden anyone else — so deep that maybe he’d forget it himself. 

 

He doesn’t know how successful he’s been, but right now there is no question. Right now it is more alive and more present than any of the rest of him has ever been, the grief and the shame so visceral and so overwhelming that it feels like a separate consciousness inside of him, swelling to a size that one human alone can’t hold. 

 

He turns to Tony, but Tony is already a blur of tears and heat. 

 

“I’m sorry,” he blubbers. “Shit. I’m — I’m not —  _ you’re _ not — ”

 

Whatever he’s going to say ends up muffled in Tony’s shoulder, because Tony has pulled him in and is holding him there, his arms around Peter’s shoulders, his voice firm in his ear. 

 

“Listen,” he says. “Whatever the hell happened here — one thing I know for damn sure, is — ”

 

He never does get to finish the thought, whatever it is. The glass of the main windows smashes so loudly that Peter doesn’t just hear it in his ears, but every cell in his body. He’s reeling, stunned, incapacitated, but only for a second. 

 

It’s a second too long. A second that costs him. 

 

He shoots a web, but it freezes in mid-air. He turns to Tony, but he’s also stiff as a board, the nanotech spreading into his Iron Man armor in its usual unnerving way, but Tony’s body too frozen to do anything with it. 

 

There’s a low cackle, and then everything goes black. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you guys so freaking much again for your patience. these deadlines have my head spinning. also, tbh, i rewrote this chapter like three times — the new spider-man: far from home trailer really threw me for a loop. while this isn't necessarily compliant to that, it did inspire me to tweak some stuff (except morgan, who is, like her father before her, an Unrepentant Sassy Bitch). 
> 
> as always, y'all can find me at upcamethesun on tumblr. i'm taking requests, with the understanding that if i do pick them up, it may be months. BUT. they are still deeply appreciated, and given a lot of thought and love, even if they are ridiculously slow to come to fruition.

**Author's Note:**

> I am neck deep in my day job and book deadlines right now but I intentionally got ahead of schedule because this movie is obviously an emergency. "A Perfect Storm" is on hiatus until late May, but this will update four or five times in that span, whenever I can squeeze in free time. I just ... needed ... to fix this. In the only way I knew how. Please forgive my chaotic little trash heart.


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